Syntax and Semantics Babble (S-Babble) is a weekly informal discussion group at UC San Diego on theoretical and experimental aspects of syntax and semantics and related areas such as their interfaces with morphology, pragmatics, and philosophy of language
S-Babble is open to all students and faculty
Speakers are asked to prepare a talk that is no longer than 50 mins and send a title as early as possible, but at least one week before the talk
An abstract of the talk and suggestions for background readings are welcome
Speakers are fully free to choose among the following 3 presentation options
1. Full talk without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
2. Beginning of the talk (up to a specified point) without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
3. The talk can be interrupted with questions at any time
Tuesday 11 am - 12:30 pm
APM 4218 and/or Zoom as indicated (email eclem [at] ucsd [dot] edu to be added to our weekly email list to receive Zoom links)
Faculty sponsors: Ivano Caponigro and Emily Clem
Student organizer: JJ Lim
Cable (2007, 2010) argues that Tlingit possesses a Q(uestion) particle comparable to Japanese (Kishimoto 2005) and Sinhala (Hagstrom 1998) and he provides five general properties to explicate the similarities between the particles among the three languages (a summary of these properties can be found in Cable 2010: p. 36):
i) obligatory in content questions---more generally required in every clause containing a wh-word
ii) must c-command the wh-word
iii) wh+Q must occur left of sentence
Considering three of Cable’s proposed properties of Q-particles and wh-words, I will present data that confirms Schauber’s (1979) analysis of Diné Bizaad questions that the Diné Q-particles are optional; the language’s Q-particles may occur in positions that do not obligatorily c-command the wh-word; and that the wh-word and the Q-particle do not need to appear together in sentence-initial position. Novel data shows that in ditransitive sentences, the specific Diné Bizaad Q-particle, shą’, is restricted to either wh-words or non-wh NPs which are positioned before the wh-word in a content question. Felicity judgments based on provided contexts will show that this particle is sensitive to information structure.
Bert Lipman has famously argued that vague languages cannot be game-theoretically optimal. This creates a puzzle: if vagueness is of no use to language users, then why is it so prevalent? In this talk, we use signaling games to address this puzzle. In extant work involving signaling games, vagueness is modeled as a mixed (i.e., non-deterministic) signaling strategy. We argue that this modeling criterion is inadequate and instead propose to model vagueness as the presence of a region in which signaling is (almost) absent, located between two regions of signaling. We show that on this understanding, vague languages can be optimal.
All languages have ways to express accompanying. Languages like English and Spanish use a preposition: I went to the party with María / Fui a la fiesta con María. Ch'ol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, uses three strategies, none of which involve a preposition. The one most divergent from English, which has been described in the Mayan literature as a "relational noun", shows agreement between the subject of the sentence and the comitative participant. For the same sentence in Ch'ol, Tsajñiyoñ tyi k'iñijel kik'oty xMaria, the predicate tsajñi has first person agreement (-yoñ), ik'oty, the comitative, introduces the comitative participant, Maria, and has first person agreement: the k- prefix of kik'oty. Essentially, the Ch'ol comitative marks both the subject of the sentence and the comitative participant. I investigate this structure and provide an analysis that hinges on a raising structure, arguing it can be extended to Ch'ol. I further discuss implications for theories of Agree and movement.
All Babblers are invited to give short informal presentations of data, ideas, or questions related to syntax and/or semantics to kick things off for the year! We encourage you to use this opportunity for group feedback and discussion on any topics or puzzles that you've been musing over lately. Names of those who would like to present will be drawn randomly, and each presenter will have 5-10 minutes (depending on the number of presenters) for presentation and discussion. You are still welcome and encouraged to attend even if you do not have a topic you would like to present. This will also be a chance to introduce yourself and your work to prospective linguistics PhD students.
All Babblers are invited to give short informal presentations of data, ideas, or questions related to syntax and/or semantics to kick things off for the year! We encourage you to use this opportunity for group feedback and discussion on any topics or puzzles that you've been musing over lately. Names of those who would like to present will be drawn randomly, and each presenter will have 5-10 minutes (depending on the number of presenters) for presentation and discussion. You are still welcome and encouraged to attend even if you do not have a topic you would like to present.
Some of us hope that one day we’ll be able to reduce all instances of Movement to Agree. About Agree, we know that “omnivorous” patterns exist, where a probe will skip a more local goal to target one further away, if the less local goal has some special feature(s) that the probe is interested in. If Movement is Agree, we should therefore expect “omnivorous” movement patterns, where out of two goals, a more featurally special but less local one is favored for movement over a closer one. This is pretty much exactly what goes on in typical Ā-context: in object questions, C moves the wh-object and skips the closer (non-wh) subject. And indeed, we’re used to thinking that Ā-movement can be non-local, but A-movement is strictly local. Given enough featural distinctions, however, there’s no principled reason why we shouldn’t expect omnivorous movement patterns to hold in the realm of pure A-movement as well (not even a little bit mixed A/Ā). Based on own fieldwork on Äiwoo (Solomon Islands; Oceanic < Austronesian), I argue that this is precisely the kind of pattern we see in a particular corner of the grammar of this language. Movement to spec,TP in this language favors pronouns over lexical DPs: T will skip a closer lexical DP subject to rather move an object pronoun instead. This also teaches us something about why and how syntax treats pronouns and full DPs differently, and I suggest that at least in this language, any explanations based on “greed” (“this pronoun needs to move because it’s deficient”) or any kind of “licensing” don’t work.
The acceptability of multiple clausal center-embedding has been a central issue in syntax since the early days of generative linguistics (Chomsky & Miller 1963). However, prior research on this phenomenon has involved intuitions or experiments with coined example sentences, rather than naturalistic data. While multiple center-embedding may be quite uncommon in English, we have nonetheless observed many genuine examples. We investigate center-embedding in natural English discourse, using a collection of over 130 attested examples. Our examples show several facilitating features which recur in these sentences: relative clauses (especially subject relatives) embedded within center-embedded complement clauses are the most common configuration, and more discourse-accessible subjects are favored in embedded clauses. These observations reflect, but also elaborate on, prior experimental work concerning the processability and acceptability of multiple center-embedding, and point to a prototype for acceptable center-embedding in English.